


Bigger Than These Bones

by below_the_starry_clusters_bright



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Force Bond, Gen, Luke Skywalker kind of just winging it in terms of being a teacher, Some angst, battle of wills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 10:13:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5824615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/below_the_starry_clusters_bright/pseuds/below_the_starry_clusters_bright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You know that forgiveness isn’t that easy,” Rey says, gentler but still determined to get her point across. “It isn’t like a switch I can flip just because you’re teaching me all these virtues.”<br/>She probably sounds condescending. In fact, she knows she does. She’s letting her frustration with the Jedi philosophy bleed out from where she had been keeping it compressed in an unkind part of her mind. She can’t help it; she had grown up on a desolate wasteland of a planet, and if she had nurtured the morals that Master Luke was now trying to instill in her then she would have been dead within a year. Calm passivity didn’t work in a fight. What did work, in her limited experience, was hitting things really hard in the face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bigger Than These Bones

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from my go-to Reylo song "Control" by Halsey. My first foray into Star Wars fic, apologies if anything is eye-searingly inaccurate. Takes place less than a week into Rey becoming an apprentice.

“I wanted to kill him.”

The confession doesn’t ease anything inside of Rey. She had hoped that by saying it aloud, she could remember how detrimental they were to her new Jedi perspective. Instead, the words are released on a half-defiant, half-ashamed breath that has Master Luke pursing his lips. Rey wonders if he regrets his insistence on emotional honesty as a part of her training.

“Why didn’t you?” he asks, surprising her. There is no judgement or praise in his tone, merely a desire to understand her.

Rey looks down at the grass beneath her folded legs. It’s spring on this planet but her mind travels back to a wintry forest. The pleasant breeze arounds her fades into an icy snap, and echoes of adrenaline twitch in her legs even though the danger has long since passed. She hadn’t had much time to appreciate the stark beauty of the planet she had helped to destroy, and her memories do nothing to help her. Instead of the curiosity and wonder she had felt at experiencing her first snowfall, she associates the planet with pain and death. Garish red flashes across the scenery she wanted to preserve as pure, and a dark figure lunges at her through the beautifully skeletal trees.

She remembers that same dark figure beaten and bloodied in the snow, staring up at her with awed intrigue. Her anger had demanded his life as a sacrifice, and she was still considering appeasing the darkness when the ground beneath them cracked open and made the choice for her.

Rey doesn’t tell Master Luke any of this. It sounds too sentimental in some parts and too horrifying in others.

“I couldn’t,” is all she says, and if the Master takes the reason as a moral victory rather than a geographical failure, then that isn’t Rey’s fault.

“There are many who could have done.”

From anyone else it would sound like a hint at a personal desire for vengeance, but Master Luke only ever comments on the galaxy’s inclination towards violence with a kind of weary acceptance. Rey wonders how much of the blame for that lies on his nephew’s shoulders.

“I thought at first that he wanted to kill me, too.” Rey wraps her finger around a blade of grass and tugs on it until it snaps. “Looking back, I’m not so sure.”

“What makes you uncertain?”

Rey falls back into that winter night. She remembers Kylo Ren’s lightsaber pressed close to her face, its bright glow blinding her as it spat tiny burning flecks onto her skin. She remembers thinking what agony waited for her if he decided to press its full brunt down against her. She remembers what he chose to do instead.

“He offered to teach me,” she says, and even now her tone lilts with confusion. “I said no.” A pause. Another broken blade of grass. “Well, I didn’t _technically_ say anything, but I cut his face open with a lightsaber so I think he got the message.”

Master Luke does not smile. His mouth is only ever varying degrees of tight, as though his lips have forgotten how to twist up under the weight of a constant downward tug.

“A wound to the head could have been fatal.”

“He’s still alive.” Rey doesn’t know whether her Master had been expressing concern or condemnation, and in turn doesn’t know if she’s reassuring him or absolving herself. There’s more to say, but she has to test the words on her tongue before letting them fall. Her mouth goes dry at the decision to trust Master Luke with a secret she had been too afraid to share before now. “I’d know if he was dead.”

“How?”

He already knows how. He must do; one of his first lessons in the Force had been to explain to Rey the bond it created between its users and those they felt connected to. He’s still going to make her say it, though.

“He tried to find out where you were,” she stumbles over the words, not wanting to make it seem as though she’s blaming him, “back on his ship, but I turned it against him.”

Master Luke frowns. “How do you mean?”

Rey tugs at a clump grass harder than is necessary. Does Master Luke not believe her, or does he just want clarification?

“I was inside his head. I didn’t mean to be,” she adds quickly, afraid that she’s making it seem as though she has a useful ability when in reality she conjured it up once by accident. “I’m not even sure I could do it again. And it wasn’t like a string of coherent thoughts. It was more…images, and the emotions he associated with them.”

His fear had been a thick, cloying thing, overwhelming her own sense of terror even though she was the one strapped in a chair at the mercy of a maskless monster. It should have made him appear more human, and in a way it did, yet it also made him more frightening. Rey knew what fear could drive a person to do.

She sneaks a glance at her Master and feels her own jolt of fear at the taut lines of concern etched into his forehead.

“Did the connection persist afterwards?” he asks.

Rey is quiet for a long time, which is in itself an answer.

“I can feel him sometimes,” she admits, speaking quietly to the collection of rootless grass she has scattered by her toes. “He’s this festering weight in the back of my mind. He can feel me too, I think. He draws on how much I hate him.”

There have been moments where, in addition to her own negativity, she has had to contend with a darkness that isn’t hers. It has its own signature, a slashed thing written in blood across her mind. She has been able to shut it out for the most part, and she keeps herself so busy that her mind is working too fast to allow an invasion, but fear is growing inside her that she won’t be able to outrun it forever.

Kylo Ren has carved out a space in her mind, and he’s clinging to it with metal claws.

Rey’s expression darkens at the thought, drawing a sigh from her Master.

“You have to let go of your anger, Rey.”

It’s gentle advice, kindly meant, but Rey can’t help but dismiss it. Anger was all that had kept her alive some nights on Jakku. She would lie in a makeshift hammock in her makeshift home, listening to the howls of the sandstorm outside and the lower, pained growls coming from her stomach, and stew over how absolutely _furious_ she was at everything. Her parents, for leaving her here. Unkar Plutt, for refusing to deal fairly. The lines etched into the wall, for their ever-increasing number. She would glare at her metal roof and feel as though she could tear it in two with her rage.

The nights would always pass, the storms would always end, her anger would always simmer. Rey wishes she could remember how it happened, because right now the near-constant need to scream and lash out doesn’t seem like something she can tame. It’s with her from the moment she wakes up to the moment she closes her eyes at the end of the day. It’s exhausting, not least because beneath all that anger, maybe even fuelling it, is the knowledge that it was exactly this kind of strong hatred that made Ben Solo fall in the first place.

As though he can sense the scoff Rey is trying to hold back ( _He probably can_ , Rey reminds herself), Master Luke tries again.

“You have to forgive him.”

Rey looks up sharply. “Have you?”

It’s a cruel question. Master Luke carries around a graveyard on his back, made heavier by the knowledge that it had once been the important weight of potential. He had been betrayed and blindsided by not only an apprentice but a member of his own family. It isn’t fair to equate his pain with Rey’s.

And yet she does. It may not have technically been on the same scale, but losing everything feels the same whether ‘everything’ is one thing or a hundred. Rey remembers collapsing next to Finn and sobbing into his jacket, convinced that the only friend she had ever had was dead in the snow, like her would-be mentor before him, and like she very soon would be too. That Chewie had shown up like a miracle to save them didn’t erase the fact that, for a second, everything Rey cared for been taken away from her.

“You know that forgiveness isn’t that easy,” Rey says, gentler but still determined to get her point across. “It isn’t like a switch I can flip just because you’re teaching me all these virtues.”

She probably sounds condescending. In fact, she knows she does. She’s letting her frustration with the Jedi philosophy bleed out from where she had been keeping it compressed in an unkind part of her mind. She can’t help it; she had grown up on a desolate wasteland of a planet, and if she had nurtured the morals that Master Luke was now trying to instill in her then she would have been dead within a year. Calm passivity didn’t work in a fight. What did work, in her limited experience, was hitting things really hard in the face.

Master Luke would not be swayed.

“Hatred for the Dark Side is still hatred. It will still consume you.”

Rey feels her temper beginning to fray. It had been doing that with alarming frequency ever since she had arrived on Ach-to. It would be easy to attribute it entirely to Kylo Ren’s influence, but in reality Rey wonders if it doesn’t just stem from the clashes in her and her Master’s philosophies.

“Feeling something strongly doesn’t automatically mean that I’m evil,” Rey argues. She thinks of the fierce protectiveness she feels for her friends, of how it’s one of the sources of her loathing of the First Order, and wonders how anyone could ever call it bad. “It just makes me human.”

“Jedi have to transcend humanity.”

Rey had learned during her first hour here that there was no arguing with Master Luke once his eyes shone with the fervour they displayed now. She can privately disagree all she likes, but her words will fall on deaf ears. It’s both maddening and a relief to have an escape from the conversation.

She spends the rest of the day moving small rocks with the Force. She wouldn’t call it a waste of time, exactly, although unless Kylo Ren’s secret weakness is neatly stacked stones then she doesn’t really see the point.

Still, it’s exhausting work. Her mind is drained by nightfall and she’s glad to retire to her room and forget about everything except sleep. She curls up beneath her blanket, too tired to draw the flimsy material that constitutes as a curtain and block out the moonlight that shines a stripe across her bed.

_I wouldn’t have you wasting your potential like this._

The unmodulated voice is as clear as if he was lying beside her, murmuring into her ear. Rey bolts upright, her heart hammering, and lunges for the staff propped against the wall by her side. She’s on her feet, shaken but ready for a fight, before she realizes that the room is empty. Her fingers don’t loosen their grip around her weapon as she glances around the room from corner to corner, wishing for a better source of light than the moon.

When none of the shadows shift, Rey lowers her staff and waits cautiously for her heartbeat to stop slamming against her chest. Had she been asleep without realizing it? Was the voice nothing but a nightmare that her mind tricked her into thinking was real? She tosses her staff aside and presses her knuckles into her eyes. Two weeks here and she’s already losing her mind. Trust her loss of sanity to be narrated by Kylo Ren.

_Would you prefer madness?_

Rey snarls aloud and slaps an open palm against her temple. He can’t be here. There are protective shields around the island to stop things like this from happening.

_Because I can arrange madness, if you like._

Rey might think she was imagining the one-sided conversation, if not for the familiar sense of occupation in her mind. It’s different from his earlier attempts at interrogation, which had her mind railing violently against his unwanted presence. She can still feel him but it’s an unobtrusive awareness, like what she imagines a comfortable silence between old friends to be. It’s reassuring, almost intimate. The wrongness of it sends a fresh wave of fury through her.

 _You’re angry_ , he notes. _Good_.

“Get out of my head,” Rey says aloud, spitting the echo with the same tight outrage she had felt on his ship.

She glares into the gloom ahead of her, debating whether to rouse Master Luke from his sleep. She probably should, but it feels too much like admitting defeat.

_I could teach you how to block me._

The offer comes with an impression of sincerity that Rey knows has nothing to do with her own emotions. He’s projecting his own feelings or she’s picking up on them. Either way, Rey is horrified at the connection.

“I don’t ever want to see you again,” she tells the empty room.

 _That isn’t true. You want to see me, then kill me_.

He doesn’t sound upset about it. If anything, he sounds pleased. Revulsion shudders through Rey, but only because he isn’t entirely wrong.

More to remind herself than to reject him, she says, “Jedi don’t kill.”

 _Is that what Skywalker told you?_ There’s a flash of sneering contempt that has Rey closing her eyes in an attempt to block it. _Interesting.  
_

Rey shakes her head. He’s trying to make her doubt her Master. It’s a thin attempt at manipulation and she won’t even both acknowledging it. Still, hearing Kylo Ren speak the name of the man he’s hunting down sends a spark of fear through her. What if their connection somehow acts as a tracking device?

 _That isn’t how this works_.

His voice cuts through her fears. Rey curses herself for not protecting her thoughts better. She’ll have to learn how to build a fortress around her mind in case her enemy plans to make a habit of loitering around it.

 _But then, maybe I’m lying._ He sounds casual and he’s not projecting anything onto her. To her frustration, Rey has no idea of his intentions. _Maybe I’m on my way right now. Reach through the connection, find the truth for yourself._

Rey backs up until the back of her legs hit her bed. She lets herself fall backwards, too busy forming a plan to worry about a graceful landing. The moment she hits her blanket, her body moves itself automatically into its usual cross-legged meditation position. She closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing, trying to achieve some semblance of calm despite feeling the pressure of attack.

She needs him out of her mind, far away from any incriminating thought that could betray her location. Last time, it had been a power struggle. He had pushed and she had pushed back harder. Now he was meandering in her memories like one would stroll through a garden, and Rey can’t latch onto him long enough to evict him.

 _I’ve been training, too_ , he says, likely sensing her panic-tinged confusion, _and unlike yours, my Master doesn’t believe in the practical applications of collecting rocks._

He drags random memories to the surface of Rey’s mind. She’s eleven, feverish, convinced she’s going to die. She’s seven and poking curiously around the fallen creature whose hollow insides would become her home. She’s fifteen, eating the day’s meager portion.

The images are glanced through and discarded with polite interest. Kylo Ren doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular, but intuition tells Rey that he’s attempting misdirection. Rey coils herself like a barely restrained animal, waiting to snap its jaws at the first sign of an intruder.

When he attacks, it’s with the same smooth strike as Jakku’s most dangerous snake. Its venom took three days to kill a grown man, while making him spend every second of those days praying for death. Rey had been warned as a child that the best way to combat the snake was to avoid it entirely.

It’s too late – _much too late_ – to apply the same tactic to Kylo Ren’s assault, but Rey takes inspiration from the idea of evasion. She hastily assembles barricades of memories and throws them up against his relentless surge, hiding any knowledge of Master Luke behind years’ worth of facts about desert plants and scavenged parts. She thinks about which mechanical objects would give her the most portions and which defunct technologies would punish her with the least. If she’d had the time, she would have cursed at him in all the languages she knows; as it is, she only hurls random words and phrases to the walls and hopes they stick. She keeps thoughts of her friends sacred but lets nothing else escape being turned into a barrier.

Eventually, it’s too much for him to process. She feels his reluctant retreat, and slowly comes back to her own senses. The cool night air filters in around her consciousness, filled with her heavy breaths of exertion. She can’t feel smug at her victory; although Kylo Ren’s presence in her mind is less fraught, she’s still on her highest alert.

 _I suppose there’s some natural talent that can survive even Skywalker’s_ _pitiful attempts at teaching_.

His bitterness doesn’t surprise her, his anger even less so, but Rey gets the feeling that he doesn’t mean to let her know that he’s impressed. She can feel his poisoned approval like a heavy hand stoking the back of her head. She shudders as though it will dispel the weight.

“Don’t try that again,” Rey says, hoping it sounds like a warning and not a plea.

_You won’t withstand it the next time I do._

The arrogance is back, supported by the ever-present rage he uses to prop himself up. Rey promises herself that he won’t get another chance to invade her mind. She feels a faint thrum of amusement which only strengthens her resolve.

_You really don’t know anything, do you? Has Skywalker taught you about the other Jedi yet? I would imagine not._

His words come thick and fast, barely giving her time to process them before they’re gone and replaced. Rey winces against the onslaught, trying to keep up.

 _The more you learn, the more_ _you’ll begin to wonder why the most powerful of them always fell to the Dark Side. I’ll save you the trouble of researching it._ _They were tired of constraints._

Rey pushes down her alarm. Just because she doesn’t agree with all of Master Luke’s methods doesn’t mean she will turn against him. Things are never that straightforward. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

 _I’ve seen enough of you to know that you don’t flourish under rules._ Again, Rey can feel his approval. _Your power isn’t meant to be filtered through things someone else decided aren’t acceptable to feel._

_You’ll come to understand that. It’s just a matter of time.  
_

What frightens her is how assured he is. He truly believes everything he’s telling her, including his certainty over her inevitable fall. It doesn’t make him right, of course, but he possesses a level of conviction that Rey doesn’t know how to overcome.

“You don’t strike me as the patient type,” she says, because she has to say something.

_You’ll be worth the wait._

It’s one quiet certainty too far. She needs him gone, now.

Her mental blocks are different this time, comprised of images of duracrete stretching around her and pushing outwards. They’re devoid of anything personal; now that Kylo Ren isn’t otherwise occupied, he would take her memories as ammunition rather than distractions, and Rey can’t afford that added weakness.

She ought to be calm and steadfast in the way Master Luke taught her to be, but her mind is in tumult. The most important thing right now is to keep herself safe, and she will improve on the methods later. Her fear builds the wall, and her anger strengthens it. A deep need for vengeance spills into any cracks and acts as a final fortification.

The combination slowly edges Kylo Ren out, but not nearly far enough. She can feel his faint presence on the other side of her wall, settling down for a long wait.


End file.
